Critique Of The Video 'Stamping Ground'

Part one:

For my dance critique I chose to do the Stamping Ground by Jirí Kylián. I watched the whole video and learned the dance was inspired by folk dancing from supposedly “primitive people” and their tribals dances. After watching the dance, I recognized some interesting aspects of the dance. In the beginning of the dance there is no music, the only thing you hear is the sounds of the dancers clapping, stomping, and shuffling their feet against the stage. The nature of this dance was meant to imitate or utilize tribal movements and Kylián was successful by using animalistic movements during the dance. There were several movements that imitated animals such as gorillas, snakes, and fish. In turn I saw technical training through this dance

He did a great job because even through the tribal movements you can tell the dancers have technical training and notice aspects of ballet in the dance. Observing the aberrational culture firsthand on an Australian island gave the choreographer details and elements that he could utilize in his work. He noticed a lot of technical things he found important that he did not know about before such as the various ways of stamping. Jirí Kylián’s goal with this dance was to convey the unique styles of tribal dance with ballet aspects involved. He thought the traditional aspects of tribal culture in Australia were being destroyed and he thought it was important that the termination of their culture be prevented. So not only did he choreograph this dance to merge cultures, but to bring awareness to tribal dance so it is not forgotten nor

I knew how time consuming it was and how much training dancers had to go through because some of my friends do dance. Although this class has helped clarify and categorize a lot of things. For example, I had no idea there was Ballet and Contemporary Ballet. I thought all ballet was the same because I grouped Ballet with slower dances. Along with that, I had no idea there were so many different types of dances like folk dancing, dance theatre, slam dancing, krumping, and clowning. When I thought about it and after reading the descriptions, I recalled having seen these types of dances before, but I never knew how many categories there were. I typically grouped a lot of them together. I would have considered krumping, clowning, and break dancing as just “hip hop”. I would not have even considered dance theater as real dance, I would have assumed it was just musicals that included dancing or plays that included dancing. This class has really opened my eyes about the variety dance holds, dance is such a broad category, and I did not realize just how broad until this